HRT to take or not to take?

Its a horrible conundrum! Once I had been deemed to be in a full blown menopausal state my GP very quickly suggested that I take HRT, because she said I looked so exhausted! She put her hand on my arm and affirmed to me just how awful I looked (haggared like an old crone! my words not hers! ), and with a sympathetic but pained expression on her face wrote me out a prescription there and then. She said due to my age (47) that I would need some protective oestrogen for a few years to help with my bones and heart and to "give me a much needed boost". I dutifully slumped over to the pharmacy and waited in line with the other miserable folk, too beffudled to think, to tired to care. I put off taking it for a few days, I just didn't want to put the pills in my mouth, but eventually I succumbed and away I went for 9 months. Gradually over the first 6 weeks I began to feel quite a lot better and I forgot myself for a while until I stared noticing that I had double chins on my ankles every night and a built in life saver around my middle where my waist used to be! I had read that actually HRT doesn't make you put on weight unless you eat more, its as simple as that, just have some self control! In reality the words 'voracious' and 'ravenous' and totally out of this world 'hippo hunger' come to mind and there is no self control when you become a hungry hippo! I am very vain and so the decision to stop the pills was easy for me. I would rather be in the full blown state than put on any more weight than is absolutely neccessary at this point in the proceedings, however I know that the decision to take or not to take is not so easy for some. At the moment I am trying homeopathy which I am not wholeheartedly convinced by, however, at least it gives me a little feeling of being in control and a bit of a crutch to lean on when I really feel 'in the mud' (why the ongoing hippo analogies!). I think we have to go with our gut feelings on HRT and see what works for us. Whatever we choose, the challenge remains the same, to get through it without to much damage to ourselves and those we love.